1. Field
The present disclosure relates to a multilayer ceramic capacitor and a board having the same mounted thereon.
2. Description of Related Art
Electronic components that use ceramic material include capacitors, inductors, piezoelectric devices, varistors, thermistors, and the like.
Among such ceramic electronic components, a multilayer ceramic capacitor (MLCC) has positive attributes such as miniaturizability, guaranteed high capacitance, and ease in mounting.
Multilayer ceramic capacitors are chip-type condensers installed on printed circuit boards of various electronic products, for example, image display devices such as liquid crystal displays (LCDs), plasma display panels (PDPs) or the like, computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), mobile phones, and the like, to charge or discharge electricity.
Such multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs) may be formed by alternately laminating a plurality of dielectric layers and internal electrodes to form a laminate, sintering the laminate, and installing external electrodes. The capacitance may be generally determined by the number of laminated layers of internal electrodes.
On the other hand, a predetermined area is required in order to mount the multilayer ceramic capacitor on the printed circuit board.
When a plurality of multilayer ceramic capacitors having various electrical characteristics are mounted on a single printed circuit board, a predetermined amount of space should be secured, such that respective multilayer ceramic capacitors may operate properly.
With the miniaturization of electronic products, multilayer ceramic capacitors used in such electronic products are also required to be miniaturized and have high capacitance.
However, when an electronic product is slimmed and miniaturized, there may be limited space in which the mount the multilayer ceramic capacitor and it may thus be difficult to design the product.
As the size of an electronic product is miniaturized and the battery size is increased to increase the continuous use time, the size of the printed circuit board and the number and size of passive elements are increasingly restricted.
As a result, the demand for multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCC) having higher capacitances in products having smaller sizes is increasing.
Manufacturers are developing a highly laminated design by reducing a thickness of each layer while reducing cover and margin thicknesses in order to produce miniaturized and high capacitance products.
As a layer is thinned and the number of laminated layers increases according to ultra high capacitance and miniaturization of a multilayer ceramic capacitor, the number of lead portions for improving electrical characteristics is also increasing.
When the number of lead portions increases, the cumulative step height of the laminate increases, which may thus increase an inverse step at a peripheral portion where there is no lead portion present and thereby adversely affect yield and the product reliability.
In order to increase the capacitance per unit volume, there is a tendency to reduce thicknesses of a cover and margin of a laminate, which may further increase the adverse effect due to a step height difference.
Therefore, there is a demand for a method capable of eliminating various side effects caused by step height differences without deteriorating electrical characteristics.
A technique is disclosed in the related art in which negative printing is performed to fill a portion having no internal electrode with a dielectric material, but this method has a disadvantage in that the process may be complicated and impractical.